Announcing the Finalists for the 2024 Big Other Readers’ Choice Award!

We’re excited to announce the finalists for the 2024 Big Other Readers’ Choice Award! The winner will be announced at the 2024 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony, which will be aired virtually (date and time to be announced).

Big thanks to the following writers for their lists: Jane Ciabattari, Raymond de Borja, Joan Frank, Hillary Leftwich, Peter Markus, Miranda Mellis, David Naimon, Dawn Raffel, Constance Squires, Terese Svoboda, Tony Trigilio, Dan Wickett, and Angela Woodward!

Without further ado, here are the finalists for the 2024 Big Other Readers’ Choice Award:

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s No One Knows Their Blood Type (CSU Poetry Center), translated by Hazem Jamjoum

Rae Armantrout’s Go Figure (Wesleyan University Press)

Matthew Baker’s The Sentence (Dzanc Books)

Makalani Bandele’s (jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk (Futurepoem)

Daniel Borzutzky’s The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (Coffee House Press)

Vincent Czyz’s Sun Eye Moon Eye (Spuyten Duyvil)

Edwidge Danticat’s We’re Alone (Graywolf Press)

Najwan Darwish’s No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems, 2014-2024 (Yale University Press), translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Jean-Baptiste Del-Almo’s The Son of Man (Grove Press), translated by Frank Wynne

John Gallaher’s My Life in Brutalist Architecture (Four Way Books)

Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough’s Object 7 (Futurepoem)

Fahima Ife’s Septet for the Luminous Ones (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Fady Joudah’s […] (Milkweed Editions)

Karen An-Hwei Lee’s The Beautiful Immunity (Tupelo Press)

Garielle Lutz’s Backwardness (Short Flight / Long Drive Books)

Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles (Nightboat Books)

Dunya Mikhail’s Tablets: Secrets of the Clay (New Directions)

Lance Olsen’s Absolute Away (Dzanc Books)

Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera (Graywolf Press)

James Reich’s Skinship (Anti-Oedipus Press)

Danez Smith’s Bluff (Graywolf Press)

Kyle Thomas Smith’s François (Streetlegal Press)

Terese Svoboda’s Roxy and Coco (West Virginia University Press)

Shze-Hui Tjoa’s The Story Game (Tin House)

David Trinidad’s Sleeping with Bashō (BlazeVOX)

Tony Koji Wallin-Sato’s Okaerinasai (Wet Cement Press)

Honorable Mention:

Samuel Ace’s I Want to Start by Saying (CSU Poetry Center)

Alisa Alering’s Smothermoss (Tin House)

Rosa Alcalá’s You (Coffee House Press)

Kenzie Allen’s Cloud Missives (Tin House)

Selva Almada’s Not a River (Charco Press), translated by Annie McDermott

Maureen Alsop’s Today Yesterday After My Death (Erratum Press)

Joseph Andras’s Faraway the Southern Sky (Verso Books), translated by Simon Leser

Franco Berardi’s Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression (Repeater Books)

Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (Verso Books)

Erin Brubacher’s These Songs I Know by Heart (Book*hug Press)

Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot (Viking)

Mark Anthony Cayanan’s Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous (UST Press)

Hélène Cixous’s Rêvoir (Seagull Books), translated by Beverley Bie Brahic

Luna Sicat Cleto’s Tatlong Proposisyon ng Puting Hangin (Balangay Books)

Olivia Cronk’s Gwenda, Rodney (Meekling)

Carys Davies’s Clear (Simon & Schuster)

Armen Davoudian’s The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House)

Raymond de Borja’s facture (Broken Sleep Books)

Sergio de la Pava’s Every Arc Bends Its Radian (Simon & Schuster)

Stacey D’Erasmo’s The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry (Graywolf Press)

Sarah Dowling’s Here Is a Figure: Grounding in Literary Form (Northwestern University Press)

Steven Dunn and Katie Jean Shinkle’s Tannery Bay (FC2)

Danielle Dutton’s Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (Coffee House Press)

Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires (Riverhead), translated by Natasha Wimmer

Percival Everett’s Sonnets for a Missing Key (Red Hen Press)

Rodrigo Fresán’s Melvill (Open Letter Books), translated by Will Vanderhyden

Mike Fu’s Masquerade (Tin House)

Austere Rex Gamao’s With Decade (Grana Books)

Amina Gautier’s The Best That You Can Do (Soft Skull Press)

Molly Giles’s Life Span (WTAW Press)

Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s Imaginary Power, Real Horizons: The Practicality of Utopianism (AK Press)

David Graeber’s The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
and Cities Made Differently (MIT Press)

Ona Gritz’s Everywhere I Look (Apprentice House)

Eli Rueda Guieb III’s Sa Dáko Pa Roón, Sa Dáko Paroón (Aklat Ulagad)

Munir Hachemi’s Living Things (Coach House Books), translated by Julia Sanches

Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger

Byung-Chul Han’s The Crisis of Narration and The Spirit of Hope (Polity Press), both translated by Daniel Steuer

Chengru He’s I Would Vanish Into Its Stronger Existence (Wet Cement Press)

Yuri Herrera’s Season of the Swamp (Graywolf Press), translated by Lisa Dillman

Charles Holdefer’s Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic (Sagging Meniscus)

BJ Hollars’s Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief (University of Wisconsin Press)

Nalo Hopkinson’s Blackheart Man (S&S/Saga Press)

Estelle Hoy’s Sake Blue: Selected Writings (After 8 Books)

Paolo Javier’s Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On) (Poets of Queens)

Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press)

Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea (Archipelago Books), translated by Humphrey Davies

Robert Kloss’s The Genocide House (Bridge Books)

Koss’s Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect (Diode Editions)

László Krasznahorkai’s Herscht 07769 (New Directions), translated by Ottilie Mulzet

Nora Lange’s Us Fools (Two Dollar Radio)

Miriam Levine’s Forget About Sleep (NYQ Books)

Kyle Liang’s Good Son (Sundress Publications)

Eric Lindley and Joe Milazzo’s Words in Danger of Falling Out of the Vocabulary (Galileo Press)

Norman Lock’s The Caricaturist (Bellevue Literary Press)

Catherine Malabou’s Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy (Polity Press), translated by Carolyn Shread

Ian S. Maloney’s South Brooklyn Exterminating (Spuyten Duyvil)

Milena Marković’s sympathy for the salami (Lavender Ink / Diágolos), translated by Steven Teref and Maja Teref

Laura Marris’s The Age of Loneliness (Graywolf Press)

Dawn Lundy Martin’s Instructions for the Lovers (Nightboat Books)

Ben Masters’s The Flitting: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Butterflies (Tin House)

Hisham Matar’s My Friends (Random House)

Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s Kinds of Grace (FlowerSong Press)

Poupeh Missaghi’s Sound Museum (Coffee House Press)

Shani Mootoo’s Oh Witness Dey! (Book*Hug Press)

Michelle Murphy’s Disheveled Histories (Wet Cement Press)

Maggie Nelson’s Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Graywolf Press)

Hanna Nordenhök’s Caesaria (Book*hug Press), translated by Saskia Vogel

Anna Noyes’s The Blue Maiden (Grove Press)

Lance Olsen’s Shrapnel: Contemplations (Anti-Oedipus Press)

Tanya Olson’s Born Backwards (YesYes Books)

Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness: A Playlist (Graywolf Press), translated by Farid Matuk

Allan Popa’s Elehiya sa Buntot ng Kometa (Aklat Ulagad)

Katie Prince’s Tell This to the Universe (YesYes Books)

Zahid Rafiq’s The World with Its Mouth Open (Tin House Books)

Kathryn Rantala’s My Archipelago (Sandy Books)

Kathryn Rantala’s The Exhibitionist (Sleeping Monkey Press)

Ingvild H. Rishøi’s Brightly Shining (Grove Press), translated by Caroline Waight

Sara Daniele Rivera’s The Blue Mimes (Graywolf Press)

David Rothenberg’s Secret Sounds of Ponds (Roof Books)

Mikeas Sánchez’s How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems (Milkweed Editions), translated by Wendy Call and Shook

Vincenz Serrano’s Now Is a New No (Ateneo de Manila University Press)

Danzy Senna’s Colored Television (Riverhead Books)

Reginald Shepherd’s The Selected Shepherd (Pitt)

Masaoka Shiki’s The Glass Clouding (Ugly Duckling Presse), translated Abby Ryder-Huth

Eric Sirota’s The Rent Eats First (Button Poetry)

Eleni Stecopoulos’s Dreaming in the Fault Zone (Nightboat Books)

Jessa Suganob and Vince Imbat’s So We Must Meet / Apart (Bangkô Collective)

Terese Svoboda’s The Long Swim (University of Massachusetts Press)

A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi (Princeton University Press), translated by Yuki Tanaka and Mary Jo Bang

Keith Taylor’s All the Time You Want: Selected Poems, 1977-2017 (Dzanc Books)

Natalie Louise Tombasco’s Milk for Gall (Southern Indiana Review Press)

Tony Trigilio’s The Punishment Book: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 4 (BlazeVOX)

Lori Tucker-Sullivan’s I Can’t Remember if I Cried (Backbeat Books)

Fien Veldman’s Hard Copy (Apollo), translated by Hester Velmans

Cecilia Vicuña’s Deer Book (Radius Books), translated by Daniel Borzutzky

Jacob Wren’s Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (Book*hug Press)

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press), translated by Lin King

(Albert Oehlen’s Greifen, 2004)

John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024) and Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming in 2026). His fiction is also published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, Hobart, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His poetry is also published in elimae, Sixth Finch, Contrapuntos, and elsewhere. His criticism is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, two-time New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.

View all posts